Russ Warren: Paintings and Sculpture will open on Friday, August 25 at Les Yeux du Monde and run through October 1.

Although Russ Warren is best known for his prints and paintings, he has also made sculpture intermittently since 1971. He returned to this medium in earnest again after seeing the galvanizing Picasso Sculpture show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 2015. Since then he has created many wonderful creatures from sandpipers to horses and figures, but lately he has concentrated on making headless gesturing humorous figures in plaster and then painted in much the same way he paints some of his paintings by layering figures or numbers or letters in this case. These will make up his cast of characters of surrogate viewers for his large paintings on the walls. The paintings are related to his “Magic Mountain”series that he began when first moving to Charlottesville and a mountaintop studio in 2009. They are layered with animals and skulls and humorous heads in all colors until they form a swirling energetic and pulsing whole. His purpose for these figures he describes as follows: “ You live in the studio with your paintings and work and rework them until you find confidence to show them to the world. You think you know them inside and out. Then the opening happens and suddenly you see your paintings like you never have seen them before.”

Russ Warren, a veteran of the art world having shown with major galleries in New York and Chicago and in important museum exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad since the 1970’s, is no stranger to the dynamics of art exhibitions. He has observed, from the outside artist’s point of view, for many years the ”strange psychological experience that takes place in a show between viewers and paintings.” He writes, “ You live in the studio with your paintings and work and rework them until you find confidence to show them to the world. You think you know them inside and out. Then the opening happens and suddenly you see your paintings like you never have seen them before.” He is consistently surprised at how the works take on a new life when they reach the exhibition stage, not only through their own compositions, subjects and colors, but in their relations to each other and to the viewers. For this show he decided to interject his own surrogate viewers—plaster, headless and painted in words, formulas and numbers that are no longer legible—into the balance.

The cast of characters for this show’s sculpture will thus be mainly painted plaster sculptures of figures, headless, gesturing and surprised, reacting to his paintings on the wall, doubling for the viewer reacting.